Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

In case you were wondering: yes, absolutely.

How expeditious of you, Pom. I think we should give him time.

You're right, how is the world supposed to know for sure if he doesn't get re-elected in 2024?

We'll know for sure if he gets re-elected in 2020.

Perhaps "dysfunctional fascism" is the best description of this admin

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Wednesday, November 1, 2017 9:27 AM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Still stand by this, recent events only confirm.

let's wait til Jan 20

sometimes fascism gets a hand

yes I always thought of Trump as an "aspiring fascist" more than the genuine article but really who cares

I have to say that I increasingly think no, he is not a fascist. He is too incompetent to be a fascist. He is too chaotic to be a fascist. He is too petty and self-interested even to be a fascist. A fascist administration would take decisive action to slow the pandemic and then use the situation to consolidate power. He just kind of fumbles around and looks for opportunities for grift.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 11:08 AM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I get that there are touches of fascist demagoguery in there, like attempts to chasten the media, racism, etc. But there's not much sense of a larger program, just a kind of instinctual political survival game.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 11:09 AM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I guess he could just be a really shitty fascist. But he doesn't seem to have much of a program or organization. He has a bunch of ideas and he's influenced by some people (Miller e.g.) who seem closer to fascism. He probably borrows some ideas and style from fascists, and he even admires fascists. But Trump is ultimately just about Trump and too dumb and short-attention-spanned to really implement anything like a fascist program. And he wasn't put forth by a fascist party either, he more just kind of snuck in through the back door of the GOP.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 1:27 PM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

still think this is right too, again, confirmed by his fumbling around at trying to maintain power. But sure, we can't be certain until we hit inauguration.

Karl what do you think is going to happen sp

i 99% think things will be ok, overall, as far as civil war 2. i think it's going to get ugly, but hopefully that will stay in isolated, deep red areas, and the militias and the like stay in their creepy KKK meeting spots.

but i think it's a little premature to think "aspiring fascism is in the rear window" when the trump faithful (literally in some cases) are still in deep denial, hold most of the country's guns, and in many cases are praying to the christian god to undo a fraudulent election that was clearly won by donald trump

i wonder if the macro flashpoint might be the refusal of about 40% of the population to take a covid19 vaccine. it sounds (and is) fucking stupid, but there are quite a few people out there who will see that as accepting the mark of the beast. wish i was joking.

the Esper firing/replacement with a Homeland Security goon who thinks it's fine to use military to quell protests is admittedly a little disconcerting and came just as I made my last posts.

I don't think he's going to get anywhere with it, but the mere fact that he made that decision now is worrisome.

Not just in the US, alas. I think about 30% of Europeans are anti-vaxxers at this point.

xps

Fascism will remain a threat, look at the grip it has on Hungary and Poland.

As long as the Alt Right exists, we're in danger

i also think that delusional, angry, scared people (like trump, like so many of his followers) are sometimes a little dangerous when they sense that they're in danger. in this case, they're in "danger" of being pushed aside politically for a few years, but they may very well interpret that as "the apocalypse is here, and our job is to carry out the lord's will"

also, since i'm spelling out my own delusions here (and again, i stress that i don't this is likely to happen at all), the stuff i worry about has little to do with trump himself. he is a fucking idiot, so is his family. they are incompetent. it comes from the second or third order-effects, the people that actually believe the bullshit they're being fed

otm, kind of where i'm at

the Esper firing/replacement with a Homeland Security goon who thinks it's fine to use military to quell protests is admittedly a little disconcerting and came just as I made my last posts.

i guess a slight bright side is that protests are likely to quell down soon anyway, because of winter, the worst wave of covid-19 we've seen yet, and the morale boost of already defeating trump. so perhaps a defense secretary willing to lend a violent hand to a fascist will find less people's lives to ruin

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that the police still love to murder Black people in cold blood at all times of year, so I wouldn't count on protests dying down, necessarily.

I more meant that you could read it as him preparing to pull some stunt that he expects to trigger unrest, that's all. It may very well be that Esper was about to resign so he just said "you're fired" instead. And it may just be a petty thing. But it seems odd to change secretary of defense just at this moment.

Just posted elsewhere but Sec of Def is supposed to be more than 6 years out of service. They can get a waiver (did for Mattis) but it does indicate another instance of a competence deficit

he doesn't have much time left, i'm not sure how much power he can consolidate through force at this point

I've read more about fascism since the start of this thread, including Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. I think Trump and his followers are more accurately described as a right-wing authoritarians. Trump's suppression of the opposition was half-assed, and his foreign policy was too random to be considered expansionist.

i read austerlitz, by w. g. sebald, and ended up doing a little re-evaluating myself. the one thing that really struck me about that book's account of the reich's arrival in austria and the czech republic was the absolutely off-the-charts administrative energy behind every single aspect of everything they did, but especially the relocating and disappearing and destroying people part. like, insane amounts of time and energy devoted to accounting in the 1930s version of spreadsheets and being responsible for and reporting on numbers and just relying on that as an overwhelmingly destructive reorganizational force. the reich had an administrative energy to it that was so amped up, possibly methed up, whereas the trumpists are like standard-issue alcoholics. they don't actually *do* anything. except for ice and the border wall and a few other areas that had some competency and a *work ethic* behind them. i'm starting to think that you can't actually be a full fascist unless you pair it with a culture of work. you can buy into the aesthetics and lick boots all you want but if no one is actually doing anything but messaging and play-acting you're just con men and religious nut jobs smoking white-supremacist and male-supremacist crack in the basement. it turns out it's a lot of work to do genocide and such. trump himself is way too lazy for that.

that's a really good post

Indeed. Comforting, to boot.

i think there's also a difference between what sebald describes as an almost ecstatic religious conversion in germany among *a lot* of people there and the u.s., which in 2020 has some institutional fascist tendencies that mainly translate into steady violence against non-white poor people. some of the people in trump's camp i think attempted to ignite white supremacist fervor on the level of germany but i feel like there's an element to it where they were looking back on it and so it became, or was from the outset, too self-reflective to generate any real heat. like in the substantive numbers that could lead to a large-scale killing project. fun stuff to think about lol.

The lack of a Nazi-like bureaucratic impulse in the modern American right is not at all comforting. Plenty of genocides have occurred sans pristine book keeping. All that spreadsheet shit is auxiliary to the main shit, not an essential feature of it.

Reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," I was surprised (in that I didn't know) how patiently Hitler played the long game. Trump is all sloppy impulse, but Hitler had a legit (for him) plan that he put into play. And from the start he was basically all or nothing, total victory or death. That is not Trump, either.

ok, show me genocides that happened without some kind of administrative competence behind them xp

Lol are you serious? Like almost every single one. Do you want me to start at the chimp wars?

Good posts map. Austerlitz is one of my favorite books ever.

Lol are you serious? Like almost every single one. Do you want me to start at the chimp wars?

― Dan I., Tuesday, November 10, 2020 12:05 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no actually. i'm thinking of human genocides post third-reich.

Good posts map. Austerlitz is one of my favorite books ever.

― treeship., Tuesday, November 10, 2020 12:10 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's extremely beautiful.

Can you define your terms, map? Right now it's looking like you're saying that fascism isn't "full fascism" until it leads to organized genocide.

The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard was serialised on R4 last week and even in short 15 minute blasts was quite exquisite, might have to dive into that book some time soon.

I remember after Trump got elected I went on a major fascism reading binge - Wilhelm Reich, Trotsky, Adorno. The "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" was probably the best of the bunch though.

Reich is good too but starts going a bit haywire two-thirds of the way in.

Can you define your terms, map? Right now it's looking like you're saying that fascism isn't "full fascism" until it leads to organized genocide.

― Lily Dale, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 12:15 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that is what i'm saying, yes.

i actually don't know much about the subject lol, would love to read more though.

It's deliberately provocative and by no means a work of non-fiction, but as a complement to Austerlitz, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, told from the perspective of a former SS officer who got off scot free, drives home the bureaucratic precision with which the Shoah was carried out to an almost nauseating degree.

ok, show me genocides that happened without some kind of administrative competence behind them xp

while your posts are excellent, the Cambodian genocide during the 4 years of DK rule was not particularly well-organized. Yes, Tuol Sleung kept meticulous records, that is true. But there was also just wanton "cadres arrive in the village, kill everybody who won't sign up" energy.

if that's the case, then does it really matter if something is truly fascism? once you reach a certain level of authoritarian, who cares about the underlying philosophy?

xxp

and much of this energy was absolutely directed at specific populations -- Muslim especially -- and seems to have been done without directives in place on any more than a "you know who to get" basis

Same with Rwanda

Disclaimer: I'm not particularly worried that either of these things will happen. But I do think either of these things *could* happen. One, Trump supporters (or, hell, one Trump supporter) could go nuts and start shooting, requiring a Biden admin to send in armed whomever in response, and two, something terrible happens to Biden. Both events would play in to right wing conspiracy theories and make those people even crazier and the country seriously unstable, which would create a power vacuum that a "law and order" person could exploit.

and Indonesia, no? xp

is it too obvious or not obvious enough that genocide is already foundational to & still performed by US & its neighbours ?

call it colonialism instead of fascism if you want but it’s part of the same thing. the bureaucracy & infrastructure which hitler admired so much already/still exists. trumpism never needed to be revolutionary